Schiavo: How TV Covered Conservatives

On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz asked a couple panelists if religious conservatives were marginalized or “got short shrift” during the Schiavo story. (I guess I’ve been watching too much Fox News [or for that matter, CNN and MSNBC], because it seemed to me religious conservatives were treated like royality.) Transcript:

KURTZ: Michelle Cottle, has the press ridiculed, or maybe I should say marginalized, religious people who believed the Terri Schiavo must be kept alive as a matter of Christian morality? COTTLE: Well, it’s not that they get out there and make fun of them. It’s just you come with a ready-made kind of visual here. You have people on the streets praying. They’re, you have very dramatic and even melodramatic protests and things like this. These people are very easy to kind of just poke fun at without even saying anything. You just kind of show these people. And the majority of Americans who don’t get out there and do this kind of, you know, really dramatic displays feel a little bit uncomfortable on that level.

The majority of Americans sided with Michael Schiavo, and that was certainly not obvious on cable news, in my opinion. Here’s the transcript…

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.